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課金 kakin
Spending real money in a game.
What does kakin mean?
Strictly it means "to charge a fee", but players flipped it: in daily speech 課金する means you paid, not the company. This is the gateway word to the whole gacha vocabulary.
Example
今月はゲームに課金しすぎた。
I spent way too much on the game this month.
Vibe
Who you can say this to, and how it lands.
Safe to use Fine in ordinary conversation.
The story behind kakin
課金 is a small grammatical scandal that everybody has agreed to ignore. Strictly the verb belongs to whoever imposes the charge, so a company 課金s a user. Players took it anyway, and 課金した now means I paid, said with a mixture of pride and mild self-reproach that the original word never carried.
Purists still grumble, which is a reliable sign that the change is permanent. Around it grew an entire economy of vocabulary: 無課金 for spending nothing, 微課金 for spending carefully, 廃課金 for spending like weather. Ask a Japanese player how much they have put into a game and the answer will arrive with one of these labels attached.
Get kakin in your pocket
課金 is one of 308 words in YABAI, a Japanese culture snack for Android. Every word comes with its meaning, an example sentence, a vibe check and a story like the one above — in 13 languages, read aloud by your device. Paid app: no ads, no sign-up, no subscription.
